The Occasional
Paper Series of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim :: www.pacificrim.usfca.edu

Pacific
Rim Report No. 23, November 2001 “Home Afar”: The Life of
Central European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War
II
by Péter Vámos

Dr.
Péter Vámos is a native of
Hungary. He received his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
in 1997 in Chinese history, and later taught classes in Chinese language
and history at Karoli Gaspar University of Sciences. In the first
half of 2001, he served as Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
DC. During this time he was invited by the USF Center for the Pacific
Rim and its Ricci Institute to deliver a paper on the life of Jewish
communities in Shanghai during World War II. Among the more than
eighty attendees at his April 25, 2001 lecture at USF were eleven
people who had actually lived in Shanghai during the war.

Currently Dr. Vámos is a research fellow in the Institute
of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Published below
is an abridged version of his presentation.

We
gratefully acknowledge the EDS-Stewart Chair for Chinese-Western
Cultural History at the USF Ricci Institute for funding this
issue of Pacific Rim Report and partial sponsorship
of this colloquium.

Introduction
Between 1938 and the outbreak of the War in the Pacific about
20,000 Jewish refugees escaped to the international city of
Shanghai. In the past twenty years, a number of books and articles
have been published about their story both in Western languages
and in Chinese. Some are memoirs by the refugees themselves,
who were part of this unique community, that existed for about
one decade. They are trying to preserve their memories for
future generations. W. Michael Blumenthal, U. S. Secretary
of the Treasury under President Carter and former refugee in
Shanghai, comments on the interest in this story for historians: "it
is perhaps, above all, an interesting and important story to
research and retell because it is so odd and improbable a tale.
Interesting, because of its peculiar setting; important because
it involved a mixed and motley group of Holocaust survivors
... in an obscure corner of the world." [1]

Shanghai, Open Port
This ‘obscure corner of the world’, Shanghai, had
been an open port since 1843 when Great Britain defeated China
in the first Opium War. After the first foreign residential quarters
were set up, change was rapid in the small fishing village ‘on
the sea’, the literal meaning of Shanghai.
Politically, Shanghai became a treaty-port of divided territories.
It consisted of three districts, with the Chinese sections in
the northern and southern parts of the city separated by foreign
concessions—the International Settlement (British and American)
and the French Concession. The foreign zones—which were
under extraterritorial administration—maintained their
own courts, police system, and armed forces. Like other treaty
ports in China, Shanghai was open to foreign trade, and by the
1930s it was one of the biggest ports in the world with a population
of four million people, among them about 100,000 foreigners.

Shanghai was a city of contrasts. As one of the Jewish refugees
described the specific atmosphere of this extraordinary city: "the
many smells ranging all the way from the burned incense in the
temples to the carts in which human excrement was collected for
fertilizer; the peculiar sounds and noises emanating from the
great variety of people from the poorest coolies to the wealthiest
men in the world; from the life of the socially accepted taxi-dancers
to the puritanistic British society ladies–Shanghai was
neither occidental nor oriental."[2]

It was a place of extremes where even such bizarre figures as
Trebitsch Lincoln could live in peace. Born the second son of
an Orthodox Hungarian Jewish family in a small town south of
Budapest, Ignácz Trebitsch went to Canada as a Christian
missionary. Then after an eventful career as Anglican curate
in Kent, liberal member of the British Parliament, German agent
in both world wars, and adviser to warlords in China, he became
a Buddhist abbot in Shanghai. [3]

Jews in Shanghai
The Jewish community of Shanghai consisted of four rather distinct
groups. The first Jews to settle in China were Sephardim from
Baghdad, who migrated eastward to newly established trading ports
in India and China in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Encouraged by the British to expand commerce in China, families
such as the Sassoons, Kadoories, Hardoons, Ezras, and Abrahams
became wealthy merchants, and many of their members soon acquired
British citizenship.

The most prominent family by far were the Sassoons, who remained
the most influential Jewish family in the Far East until the
communist takeover of Shanghai in 1949. "The Rothschilds
of the East" established an economic empire with centers
in Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, and
were involved in great charitable enterprises. The headquarters
of this empire, the Sassoon Building, stood at the intersection
of Nanking Road and the Bund. Completed in 1929, this 77 meter
high art deco palace was known as the most sumptuous house in
the Far East.[4]
While the Sephardi community in Shanghai numbered only about
seven hundred people, the Russian Ashkenazim arriving in Shanghai
in the 1920s numbered over five thousand. For the first group
of Jewish immigrants, Shanghai was a land of opportunity. The
second group came to China only partly in search of greater economic
opportunities. Seeing China more as a haven, Russian Jews escaped
the pogroms and the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution.
However, in the course of a few years, they were able to find
jobs and earn a modest living. They served as the ‘middle
class’ of the Jewish community in Shanghai.

The third group of Jews arrived in Shanghai after a pleasant
journey on Italian or German luxury liners, sometimes in first-class
berths. They took the one month long trip from Genoa or Hamburg
to the other end of the world not because they were rich merchants
or adventurers, but because they were German and Austrian Jewish
refugees who wanted to flee Nazi Germany. For them Shanghai was
the only choice.

The fourth group consisted of about 1,000 Polish Jews, including
the only complete European Jewish religious school to be saved
from Nazi destruction, the Mirrer Yeshiva. Its rabbis and students,
about 250 people, took the route from Poland to Lithuania, from
Lithuania across the Soviet Union to Kobe in Japan, from Kobe
to Shanghai, where they continued their prewar routine of Torah
study until the end of the war, when they finally reached Brooklyn.

The European Background to the Emigration
The anti-Semitic policy of Hitler's regime included the forced
emigration of the Jews from Germany as early as 1933. The goal
of the Nazis was a Judenrein Germany, a country free of Jews,
which was to be achieved by economic measures, mass arrests,
and persecution. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their
full citizenship in the Reich—they thereafter became subjects
of the state and those who left Germany lost even that lesser
status in 1941. Many Jews living in countries and territories
under German occupation or political influence considered emigration
as a possible solution. Nevertheless, a major obstacle to leaving
the organized terror behind and finding at least temporary shelter
in other parts of the world was the fact that the Western countries
were unwilling to open their doors to further Jewish immigration.
This became obvious at the Evian Conference in 1938.

On the other hand, as Germany kept expanding its territory with
the incorporation of Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia
into the Reich, and as more and more Jews fell under German control,
the organized terror campaign against them intensified. The expulsion
of the Polish Jews from Germany in October 1938 and the pogroms
of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 were followed by well-organized
and controlled violence. Jews were rounded up, arrested, and
taken to concentration camps, and many of them were released
only on the condition that they leave the country within a limited
period of time. This was the moment when most Jews decided to
flee to countries that might offer them a haven.

There was only one place, which, at least until August 1939,
required neither visas nor police certificates, neither affidavits
nor assurance of financial independence: it was the open port
of Shanghai. The International Settlement seemed a viable option
for these desperate refugees; this in spite of the fact that
they hardly knew anything about China, and what they did know
was not favorable at all. The Sino-Japanese War broke out in
1937, and the Japanese, allies of Nazi Germany, occupied parts
of the city.

Japanese Attitudes towards Jews
The Japanese attitude towards Jews was totally different from
that of the Germans. As there had never been a sizeable Jewish
community in Japan, most Japanese knew little about the Jews
and were unfamiliar with Christian theology and religious anti-Semitism
in the Christian world. In Shinto Japan the tradition of anti-Semitism
did not exist.[5] Although throughout the 1930s Japan was greatly
influenced by Nazi propaganda, Hitler's inferior racial classification
of Asian people vs. the excellence of the German race was incomprehensible
and unacceptable. However, the Japanese had their own racial
classifications and considered their own Asian neighbors as inferior.

Contrary to the German plan of Entjudung (‘removal’ of
the Jews from Germany), the Japanese wanted to make use of alleged
Jewish wealth and influence on behalf of Japan's New Order. They
believed that Jewish capital, knowledge, and technical skills
could contribute to the economic development of Japan and the
settlement of Jewish professionals, businessmen, and technicians
in Japanese occupied territories, apart from being useful to
Japan, would also help import American capital for the industrialization
of Manchuria.[6]

As early as 1933, Manchukuo had become the destination for
Jewish professionals fleeing Europe. During this same period,
Jews, mostly businessmen and professionals, went to Shanghai
in ever increasing numbers. Following the outbreak of the
Sino-Japanese War in 1937 the Japanese took control of Greater
Shanghai (the Chinese parts of the city) and also occupied
Hongkou[7] and two other northeastern sections of the International
Settlement, establishing a Chinese municipal administration
under strict Japanese control.

After the refugee flow began Japan faced the constant problem
of how to cope with the Jews without antagonizing either Germany
or the United States. Although they viewed the growing refugee
influx with deepening anxiety and tried to halt it, they wanted
to make use of the economic and political power of the Jews.
They also thought that restrictions to Jewish entry into Shanghai
might worsen Japanese–U. S. relations and endanger the
inflow of foreign capital needed for economic reconstruction.
Furthermore, Jewish refugees were still in possession of valid
German passports, even if there was a big red ‘J’ stamped
on them, and visas were unnecessary for Germans. (In August 1938,
Jews were required to bear certain first names, and those who
did not have the easily identifiable, approved names had to take
the middle name Sara or Israel. In October of the same year,
Jews were required to exchange their German passports for new
ones, clearly identified by a large red letter ‘J’.)

The official Japanese policy towards Jews, formulated by the
Five Ministers Conference held in Tokyo in December 1938, stated
that although Japan should avoid actively embracing Jews who
were expelled by her allies, to deny Jews entry would not be
in the spirit of the empire's long-standing advocacy of racial
equality.[8]

As a result of this policy, between the fall of 1938 and the
winter of 1941 about 20,000 refugees traveled to Shanghai, their
temporary home afar.

Passage to Shanghai
Shanghai could be reached from Europe via two different routes:
by sea, and by land. Jews from Germany and Austria traveled mostly
on Italian ships from Trieste or Genoa, or on German liners from
Bremen or Hamburg. The journey took about four weeks through
the Suez Canal, but some ‘cape-ships’ that wanted
to save the canal tolls took the longer route around the Cape
of Good Hope, which lasted about ten weeks.[9]
After Italy entered the war in June 1940 the sea route was virtually
blocked; only a few more ships could set sail from Portuguese
ports and Marseilles until early 1942.[10]

The land route led through the Soviet Union to Manchukuo, and
from there refugees traveled to Shanghai or other Asian destinations
by Japanese ships. These trips were organized by Intourist, the
official Soviet travel agency, and were to be paid for in US
dollars. Soviet authorities granted transit or exit visas for
those who possessed an entry visa for any third country. Refugees
could journey east via the Trans-Siberian railroad until June
1941, when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union.

Entry to Shanghai
In Shanghai no country represented was authorized to exercise
passport control after the outbreak of Sino-Japanese hostilities
in 1937, as the city was not under the jurisdiction of China
or any other single power. Immigration to Shanghai was de facto
controlled by the Japanese Navy, since they controlled the harbor.

As the number of refugees grew (and by the early months of
1939 reached about ten thousand), restrictions were imposed
upon immigration by both the Japanese authorities and the
Shanghai Municipal Council, the governing body of the International
Settlement. According to the measures taken in August 1939,
only those who had sufficient financial means to support
themselves, had a landing permit on the basis of a contract
of employment, or a marriage contract with a local resident
could enter Shanghai. The aim of these regulations was to
control and limit immigration, so that refugees would not
become a financial burden on the foreign community of the
city. As a result of these regulations, fewer people applied
for immigration certificates, and not all applicants were granted
entry permit.

Refugee Life in Shanghai, 1938-1941
The first arrivals were able to bring some of their possessions
with them, such as furniture, tools, even sewing machines, or
simply to smuggle some money out of Germany across England or
other routes when they left.[11]
As they were not without any means and had the ability to start
businesses, some of them became quite well off. However, those
who managed to get out of Germany under the strict control of
the Gestapo, arrived with only the clothes they were wearing
and one handbag each.[12]

If the newly arrived refugees had no friends or relatives who
had prepared lodging for them, they had to stay in one of the
camps set up by the relief organizations. The first such organization,
the International Committee for the Organization of European
Refugees in China (I.C.), was established in August 1938 and
financed primarily by Sassoon.[13] It was also known as the Komor
Committee for its honorary secretary, Paul Komor, a Hungarian
businessman who had lived in Shanghai since 1898, and who had
been involved in relief work as trustee of the Komor Charity
Fund and chairman and treasurer of the Hungarian Relief Fund
since 1924. Another important refugee organization was the Committee
for Assistance of European Refugees in Shanghai, under the direction
of Michael Speelman.

Both organizations had departments in charge of housing, food
supplies, medical care, education, etc. Nevertheless, after the
establishment of the Speelman Committee, the I.C. became primarily
involved in providing identification cards for the refugees.
Stateless refugees received identification cards signed by Paul
Komor. These documents were accepted by the Shanghai Municipal
Council as well as the Japanese authorities, and even by some
foreign countries, such as Australia."

As the refugees settled in, the few of them with sufficient financial
means started their own businesses, or if they were fortunate,
got a job in foreign companies that enabled them to live in confined,
yet total, privacy. Families with sufficient income (about 4,000
people), could rent a house or apartment in the more elegant
French Concession, or in the western parts of the International
Settlement. The majority of the refugees, however, could not
afford expensive housing, and had to settle in Hongkou, the Japanese
occupied northeastern part of the International Settlement, partly
demolished during the 1937 hostilities, where rents were much
lower than in the more prestigious districts of the city.

Local relief organizations with the support of the International
Red Cross and the American Jewish communities provided thousands
of penniless refugees with temporary homes.[14] The first such ‘home’ (from
the German word Heim, a term commonly used by the refugees) had
been used by the British as an Old Women's Home. Later the refugees
were housed in partially destroyed factory buildings or barracks,
with blankets and bed sheets serving as walls between the individual
families. There were homes where men and women were separated
in different dormitories.
The first one, set up in January 1939, also had a kitchen that
could serve about 7,000 meals three times a day. Two other kitchens
were established, one in a synagogue and the other in the reception
center. In spite of the fact that only a minority of the refugees
were observant, all kitchens served kosher food.

Bad sanitary conditions and insufficient food resulted in widespread
disease. The relief committees organized medical care in the
form of outpatient clinics for every inhabitant of the homes,
and there was an Emigrants’ Hospital attached to the Ward
Road Heim, lead by a Hungarian physician Dr. Veroe as superintendant.

Sir Victor Sassoon, a philanthropist and a good businessman too,
bought some houses in Hongkou and let the refugees rebuild them
for free lodging. Refugees also rented houses from Chinese landlords
and had them renovated by European craftsmen, who installed electricity
and water pipes. Then they applied for a water permit from the
City Council and after the necessary bribe the permit arrived.[15]
Entire streets in Hongkou were rebuilt by skilled refugees. With
its European style houses, cafes, bars, restaurants, nightclubs
and shops, the commercial center of the district was called Little
Vienna.

During the three-year period between 1938 and December 1941 most
newcomers were more or less able to be integrated into Shanghai's
economy, despite the fact that they had come to Shanghai out
of political necessity, and not due to economic prospects. In
addition, only a few of them had a good command of English, the
language commonly used in business circles.

Although many people had to live on charity, there was a rich
cultural life within the Jewish community. Horace Kadoorie set
up a school for Jewish children, where the language of instruction
was English, but Chinese and French were also taught, and only
after the Japanese occupation were German and Japanese introduced.
The I. C. organized English classes for adults, and English was
also taught in the refugee homes. ORT, the Organization for Reconstruction
and Training had six-month training courses in twenty-one crafts.
The refugees published several newspapers and journals, professional
musicians gave concerts, and theater plays were performed. Zionist
groups were united into the Zionistische Organization Shanghai,
with its headquarters in the restaurant ‘Hungaria’.[16]

Life after the Outbreak of the War in the Pacific
The outbreak of the War in the Pacific brought about the first
major change in refugee life. On December 8, 1941 the Japanese
military forces took control of the entire city, including all
foreign sections.

As a result of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the economic
situation of the refugees significantly worsened. All allied
business establishments were closed, and those who worked for
companies owned by enemy nationals lost their jobs. The legal
status of the majority of the refugees also became uncertain
just before the outbreak of the War in the Pacific, as those
holding German passports were declared stateless on November
29, 1941. Without a valid ID the last hope of leaving Shanghai
seemed to disappear for the reguees.

After Japan's active involvement in World War II, the Nazis felt
that they had every right to demand more cooperation from their
allies to solve the Jewish problem. In the summer of 1942 ‘rumors’ made
the rounds among the refugees in Shanghai about Josef Meisinger,
representative of the Gestapo in Tokyo who was sent to Shanghai
to discuss the question of Jewish refugees with the Japanese.
It was said that Meisinger, the ‘Butcher of Warsaw,’ who
in 1939 was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of
people in the Polish capital while head of the Gestapo there,
met in Shanghai with representatives of the Japanese Consulate,
the military police, and leaders of the Japanese Bureau of Jewish
Affairs to discuss the German plan for the final solution in
Shanghai.[17]

The Japanese, however, did not want anything to do with the Jews
that might have inspired enemy counterpropaganda and thus were
unwilling to engage in the final solution. Nevertheless, as stability
in Shanghai was the most important priority for the Japanese,
on February 18, 1943 the military authorities issued a proclamation
about the establishment of a restricted area for stateless refugees
in Hongkou where many of the Jews were already residing. Refugees
were ordered to move inside the restricted area within three
months. The proclamation did not speak about Jews in general
(actually, the word Jew was not used at all), as not all Jews
were subjected to the new regulations and forced to live in Hongkou.
Stateless refugees referred only to those who arrived in Shanghai
since 1937 from Germany (including former Austria and Czechoslovakia)
Hungary, former Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Those
who came before 1937 (the Japanese occupation of Shanghai), including
most of the Russian Jews, were not subject to internment and
remained free of restrictions. Also, the Japanese committed no
acts of violence against Jewish religious institutions, schools,
synagogues, or cemeteries.[18]

The relocation of the refugees to the designated area was assisted
by the newly established SACRA (Shanghai Ashkenazi Collaborating
Relief Association), with Dr. Abraham Cohn, a Romanian Jew who
was raised in Nagasaki and spoke Japanese fluently, as its chairman.
Following the establishment of the restricted area, SACRA became
the main local body for relief work, but most of the money came
from the JDC.

Life in the GhettoThe restricted area—or ghetto, as the refugees used to
call it—had no barbed wire or walls around it, but people
were not allowed to leave without a special pass. The proclamation
meant that about 8,000 persons who had become settled in other
parts of Shanghai had to give up their homes, shops, and offices,
and sell them to the Chinese or Japanese.[19]
The establishment of the ghetto ended most people’s careers
because if they worked for bigger companies outside the designated
area, they could not receive a pass to enter or leave the ghetto
from the Japanese authorities. Only qualified people whose business ‘served
the public’, such as physicians and engineers, could attain
the permit easily and have it renewed every month, thus continuing
to work through 1945; however, most employees and businessmen
became jobless.

The ghetto in Shanghai was not the same as its counterparts
in Europe. The 15,000 refugees were not totally isolated
as the small district of about one square mile had a population
of about 100,000 Chinese, most of who were unwilling to leave
their homes. The Japanese did not even guard the boundaries
of the ghetto; only barriers were erected at some of the
checkpoints, where Japanese soldiers, Russian police, and
Jewish civilian guards guarded the exits. Moreover, every
stateless refugee in the ghetto had to register with the
Japanese police.[20] It was not difficult to leave the ghetto
illegally; however, it was a rather risky enterprise because
a foreigner in a Chinese city was easily identifiable by
the Japanese patrols.

Russian Jews had interests in several businesses in Hongkou,
and after the establishment of the ghetto they set up even more.
Some refugees had small enterprises—such as carpenters,
locksmiths, shoemakers, and tailors; others had small cafes or
restaurants. Intellectuals gave private lessons for a lunch,
but the majority were dependent upon charity.[21] The situation
for the poverty-stricken refugees became even worse in the winter
of 1943 when coal virtually disappeared (it was cheaper to buy
boiled water than to buy coal briquettes and boil the water at
home), electricity was rationed, and there was not enough food
to keep them from starving. Free meals in the soup kitchens were
reduced to one per day, and the portions were carefully weighed.

In early 1944 the JDC resumed sending money through indirect
channels via Switzerland to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, in spite
of the American ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’ which
forbade any Jewish or other organization in the United States
to transfer funds to enemy controlled areas. The quality and
the quantity of the food were improved, and although there was
still serious undernourishment, there was no starvation.[22]

The Shanghai Jewish Chronicle and German-language radio broadcasts
reported about the development of the war in Europe. The news
about the German retreat and the surrender was greeted with quiet
celebrations.

The end of the war in Europe brought greater intensification
to the war in the Pacific. The steady advance of the Allies
in the Far East resulted in aerial bombardments in Shanghai.
There were no bomb shelters or even basements in Hongkou.
The Japanese, hoping that the Americans would not bomb
the district inhabited by foreigners, had a radio transmitter
and stored ammunition and oil in the restricted area.

On July 17, 1945, Okinawa-based U.S. bombers attacked
the radio station that had been directing the Japanese
shipping lines. Civilian areas were also hit by the
bombs, leaving hundreds of Chinese and thirty-one
European immigrants dead and several hundred wounded.[23]

The
Post-War Period
The Japanese surrender in Shanghai was announced
on August 15. The Japanese military remained
in the city maintaining order until August 26,
when a small landing party of American forces
arrived. Shortly after the end of the war, all
of Shanghai was occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s
Kuomintang forces. The pass system and the segregation
were terminated. Jews were now allowed to move
freely about the entire city. Nevertheless, the
Jewish refugee area in Hongkou remained almost
intact because most of the people did not have
the money to move back to their former homes
or to rent private rooms. The representatives
of the local relief organizations and the JDC
returned from the internment camps, and UNRRA
supplies were available.

The end of the war also opened up the possibility of leaving
Shanghai. As Shanghai’s economy was quickly revitalized,
some refugees, especially the Russians who did not suffer any
wartime disabilities, sought to stay and establish their new
life in Shanghai (Mao’s regime, however, did not allow
them to stay without Soviet papers), but the overwhelming majority
of the refugees wanted to leave.

By the time of the war’s end, news that millions
of Jews had been killed in German death camps reached Shanghai.
The refugees were informed about the Holocaust from local and
foreign press and through personal correspondence. When they
learned what happened to their relatives in Europe, most
did not want to return to their homeland.

Those who had the fewest possibilities of resettlement elsewhere—mostly
elderly people who did not want to or were not allowed to emigrate
to the United States or other Western countries—returned
to their home countries, but the rest wanted to emigrate. Hundreds
of people left for the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Latin America. After 1948, thousands of Jews,
Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Russians and Germans alike went to
live in the newly established State of Israel.[24]

ENDNOTES
1. Blumenthal, W. Michael, "Shanghai: The Persistence
of Interest," Points East, Vol. 10, No. 1. March 1996. [Back
to Text]
pp. 1, 3–4.
2. From the documentary film, The Port
of Last Resort— Refuge
in Shanghai, directed by Paul Rosdy and Joan Grossman. [Back
to Text]
3. About Ignácz Trebitsch see Bernard Wasserstein, The
Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, Yale University Press, New
Haven and London, 1988. [Back to Text]
4. The Sassoons and the other Sephardi families did not break
their ties with Shanghai. In the 1990s the Kadoorie family
donated 500,000 USD for the construction of the new Shanghai
Museum, and Albert Sassoon was first president of present day
Jewish Community of Shanghai. This community is comprised of
international professionals, businessmen and entrepreneurs
of various backgrounds and affiliations, and has a resident
rabbi. [Back to Text]
5. See Kowner, Rotem, "On Ignorance, Respect and Suspicion:
Current Japanese Attitudes towards Jews". ACTA (Analysis of
Current Trends in Antisemitism) No. 11.,
the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study
of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997.
p. 2. [Back to Text]
6. See Tokayer, Marvin and Mary Swartz, The
Fugu Plan. New
York and London, Paddington Press, 1979. [Back
to Text]
7. Hongkou is the Chinese official pinyin transcription of
the district’s name. In the 1930–40s, it was known
and referred to as Hongkew by the foreigners in Shanghai.
[Back to Text]
8. Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner, Japanese
Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma. Connecticut and London, Praeger, 1998.
p. 56. [Back to Text]
9. Ginsbourg, Anna, "Jewish Refugees in Shanghai". Shanghai,
The China Weekly Review, 1940. p. 13. [Back
to Text]
10. Marcia M. Ristaino, New Information
on Shanghai Jewish Refugees: The Evidence of the Shanghai Municipal
Police Files,
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
p. 140. in Jonathan Goldstein (ed.), The
Jews of China, Volume Two: A Sourcebook and Research Guide. New York, M. E. Sharpe,
2000. pp. 135–152. [Back to Text]
11. Fred Linden in Shanghai. Utah Oral History Institute. Wells
College Press, 1995. p. 7. [Back to Text]
12. John and Harriet Isaac, Flight to
Freedom, 1939–1947.
USHMM Archives, RG-03.011. 01. 5. [Back to Text]
13. "Jewish Refugees in Shanghai," in Oriental
Affairs,
June 1940. pp. 290–294. [Back to Text]
14. Kranzler, pp. 127–150. [Back to Text]
15. Linden, p. 8. [Back to Text]
16. Kranzler, p. 378. [Back to Text]
17. The details of the plan are described in Tokayer’s
book based on interviews with former refugees in Shanghai;
nevertheless, in the course of my research, I have not found
any archival evidence for the German Endlösung plan in
Shanghai. [Back to Text]
18. Zeitin, Josef, "The Shanghai Jewish Community. An
Historical Sketch," in Jewish Life, Vol. 41, No. 4, October
1973. pp. 54–68. [Back to Text]
19. Gruenberger, Felix, "The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai," in Jewish
Social Studies, Vol XII, No. 4, October 1950. pp. 329–348.
[Back to Text]
20. A "List of Foreigners Residing in Dee Lay Jao Police
District including Foreigners holding Chinese Naturalization
Papers" which includes 14,974 names and dates from August
24, 1944, has been discovered and published recently in Germany.
see Exil Shanghai. CD-ROM, 2000. [Back to Text]
21. Frank, László, Sanghajba
menekültem.
Budapest, Gondolat, 1960. p. 216. [Back to Text]
22. Gruenberger, p. 343. [Back to Text]
23. Tobias, Sigmund, Strange Haven: A
Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illionis Press,
1999. pp. 86–88. [Back to Text]
24. Armbüster, Georg, "Das Ende des Exils in Shanghai.
Rück- und Weiterwanderung nach 1945," in Exil
Shanghai.
pp. 184–201. [Back to Text]

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